With the proliferation of many web based applications, blogs, social media sites, media sharing sites, and web-collaboration tools, much of today’s data resides on web servers. With this data architecture, information, materials, and media can be accessed from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Data can be gathered on demand, with limited usage and storage on hardware and software at the local level. This allows access from multiple people, and does not require everyone to have that piece of data on their personal computer. Can you imagine if everyone downloaded every YouTube video that was watched? There would be massive redundancy on everyones computer, but with cloud computing, every YouTube video simply resides on YouTube’s servers, and can be accessed from their website. While cloud computing has become a business success, it is important to address the information security concerns.
There are five key areas to think about when to comes to cloud based data security. The first, and most obvious, is privileged user access. Processing and storage of data that is off site from the enterprise has inherint risk. With paper copies of documents and data, you can always keep track of their physical location. Passing off documents by hand ensures their safe arrival and that no one has accessed that data. The second issue is data location. While data is in the cloud, the files are still located on some server, somewhere in the world. While this might not seem like an issue, there are regulations on what data can be in a certain country. Also, since sensitive data might be mixed with non-sensitive data, its important that companies utilize some form of encryption for highly sensitive materials. Fourth, its important to have a backup plan. Disasters happen, and you want to make sure your cloud provider has a plan for when those do happen. Lastly, it’s important to have the flexibility to investigate potential foul behavior. It’s important for service providers to maintain the integrity of these systems by taking preventative and proactive measures.
Given the risks of cloud computing and cloud storage, PhysioGenix has developed a multi-leveled data security system to ensure that when customers utilize our data management system, their data is safe. Obvious front facing login security is made to prevent brute force attacks. There are additional security measures taken to ensure that only privileged users are able to access data. Once logged in and authenticated, sensitive documents are encrypted using AES 256 bit encryption. This is the highest level of encryption, and used by the US government for confidential documents. These systems allow PhysioGenix to provide our customers with data on demand, from anywhere in the world, while ensuring that their data is protected. Real time data is becoming a necessity in today’s business world, and PhysioGenix is leading it’s utilization in CRO data delivery. To find out more about PhysioGenix’s preclinical research services, email contact@physiogenix.com.
Matt worked at a leading data security company for two years, and now manages PhysioGenix’s website and internet presence. www.physiogenix.com